How long does the helium last? I was in school in the CRT era and it was advised not to store your helium in the same room as a CRT because gas would migrate into the vacuum inside. Helium molecules (which are helium atoms) are tiny.

These drives probably spin at 54 - 5800, actually. These are the SMR "shingled" drive heads that are meant for data archiving needs rather than the traditional magnetic heads that you'd find in the high capacity enterprise product lines.

SMR drives behave oddly, but for light access needs like a pool for storing all your porn or movies, they work just fine once you've given one 24 - 36 hours to fill up. Surprisingly, they do work acceptably in disk arrays, which is something that isn't necessarily true of some of the more modest capacity "Green" or "Eco"-type drives.

Note too that 12TB is within spitting distance of the mathematical limit for having a hard read error for a single drive all by itself. You don't wanna use drives that big for a traditional RAID5 without adding some kind of extra parity checking.

These drives probably spin at 54 - 5800, actually. These are the SMR "shingled" drive heads that are meant for data archiving needs rather than the traditional magnetic heads that you'd find in the high capacity enterprise product lines.

SMR drives behave oddly, but for light access needs like a pool for storing all your porn or movies, they work just fine once you've given one 24 - 36 hours to fill up. Surprisingly, they do work acceptably in disk arrays, which is something that isn't necessarily true of some of the more modest capacity "Green" or "Eco"-type drives.

Note too that 12TB is within spitting distance of the mathematical limit for having a hard read error for a single drive all by itself. You don't wanna use drives that big for a traditional RAID5 without adding some kind of extra parity checking.

Hrm, interesting.

Let's say I am working with a subset of a specific kind of information - I can have exactly one hard copy if one exists, and exactly one digital copy. If I want to ensure data integrity of the digital copy, how can I ensure there will never be hard drive failure without making additional copies? Assume I'm a complete cyber nub with zero education.

These drives probably spin at 54 - 5800, actually. These are the SMR "shingled" drive heads that are meant for data archiving needs rather than the traditional magnetic heads that you'd find in the high capacity enterprise product lines.

SMR drives behave oddly, but for light access needs like a pool for storing all your porn or movies, they work just fine once you've given one 24 - 36 hours to fill up. Surprisingly, they do work acceptably in disk arrays, which is something that isn't necessarily true of some of the more modest capacity "Green" or "Eco"-type drives.

Note too that 12TB is within spitting distance of the mathematical limit for having a hard read error for a single drive all by itself. You don't wanna use drives that big for a traditional RAID5 without adding some kind of extra parity checking.

NateAsbestos:Mister Peejay: gaslight: So they finally caught up with Western Digital. Why is this news?

Seagate drives don't blow goats?

My experience is the exact opposite

I've worked in the storage industry my entire career. We had a LARGE customer with our storage array. A whole 9 drive enclosure! 72GB drives! Cutting edge stuff back in the day. But they had 1000 of those enclosures.

At one point Seagate drive failures were so bad they threatened to make us replace all 9000 drives.

These drives probably spin at 54 - 5800, actually. These are the SMR "shingled" drive heads that are meant for data archiving needs rather than the traditional magnetic heads that you'd find in the high capacity enterprise product lines.

SMR drives behave oddly, but for light access needs like a pool for storing all your porn or movies, they work just fine once you've given one 24 - 36 hours to fill up. Surprisingly, they do work acceptably in disk arrays, which is something that isn't necessarily true of some of the more modest capacity "Green" or "Eco"-type drives.

Note too that 12TB is within spitting distance of the mathematical limit for having a hard read error for a single drive all by itself. You don't wanna use drives that big for a traditional RAID5 without adding some kind of extra parity checking.

Hrm, interesting.

Let's say I am working with a subset of a specific kind of information - I can have exactly one hard copy if one exists, and exactly one digital copy. If I want to ensure data integrity of the digital copy, how can I ensure there will never be hard drive failure without making additional copies? Assume I'm a complete cyber nub with zero education.

When I was a kid, I used to work at a mom & pop hobby store with my dad part time to feed my addiction to radio controlled airplanes. Every year, come science fair season, hapless peripatetic parents would come in looking for projects for the kiddies.

One day, this guy comes in and asks me where we keep the canned helium.

My dad, ever the wit, didn't bat an eye as he said "Upstairs on the ceiling."

casual disregard:Let's say I am working with a subset of a specific kind of information - I can have exactly one hard copy if one exists, and exactly one digital copy. If I want to ensure data integrity of the digital copy, how can I ensure there will never be hard drive failure without making additional copies? Assume I'm a complete cyber nub with zero education.

You can can do a parity snapshot. SnapRAID is a free, cross platform tool for doing that. ZFS is another good solution since it can do both real time parity and snapshot parity, though I'm less fond of it because it's a royal PITA to expand an existing zPool. ZFS works on OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, *BSD, Linux and OSX. Neither one of these things is completely nub-friendly, though SnapRAID is probably easier to deal with since you can just implement it with the data you already have rather than deal with migrating your data to a zPool on an OS you probably aren't familiar with and/or a configuration that's really not a default for disk drives on any OS you've used. If you're a Windows only nub, there are Storage Spaces and usually chipset support for disk mirroring, which is at least a start.

I'm not sure what this data is that you can only have as a single copy. I'd more likely advocate something like Crashplan or Backblaze for a nub. Less nub-like persons who get in to tens of terabytes of local storage should think long and hard about how cheap tapes are compared to what it takes to re-acquire tens of terabytes of user data. Having a second copy of your data sitting on a NAS is great and all but a copy of data isn't the same as incremental change tracking or some of the other good stuff a proper backup is good for.

rka:NateAsbestos: Mister Peejay: gaslight: So they finally caught up with Western Digital. Why is this news?

Seagate drives don't blow goats?

My experience is the exact opposite

I've worked in the storage industry my entire career. We had a LARGE customer with our storage array. A whole 9 drive enclosure! 72GB drives! Cutting edge stuff back in the day. But they had 1000 of those enclosures.

At one point Seagate drive failures were so bad they threatened to make us replace all 9000 drives.

I don't have a sample size of 9000 drives. But Western Digital is the only brand I've experienced a fried circuit board with.

I'm convinced that this effort to be clear by having a colour coding for MTF on drives is backfiring. They should have gone with a star or numerical rating so people understand where in the quality and reliability ladder they are putting their dollars.

I was recently setting up a workstation and yep, black for the main drive and Reds for the gobs of data it generated. The store kid looked at me like I was crazy, warning me that those drives were expensive. I hate to think how he'd been mis-advising customers.

First off, vacuums are insulators. Not good in this case. Secondly, the manufacturing tolerance required to keep it air tight for years and years and years would make the drive very expensive. A simpler solution (apart from the fact that you don't want to use a vacuum) is to use a gas other than air; thirdly, using higher grade parts is the ultimate defence. That's why cheap hard drives sell for peanuts but enterprise grade hard drive cost three or four times the price.

These drives probably spin at 54 - 5800, actually. These are the SMR "shingled" drive heads that are meant for data archiving needs rather than the traditional magnetic heads that you'd find in the high capacity enterprise product lines.

SMR drives behave oddly, but for light access needs like a pool for storing all your porn or movies, they work just fine once you've given one 24 - 36 hours to fill up. Surprisingly, they do work acceptably in disk arrays, which is something that isn't necessarily true of some of the more modest capacity "Green" or "Eco"-type drives.

Note too that 12TB is within spitting distance of the mathematical limit for having a hard read error for a single drive all by itself. You don't wanna use drives that big for a traditional RAID5 without adding some kind of extra parity checking.

Hrm, interesting.

Let's say I am working with a subset of a specific kind of information - I can have exactly one hard copy if one exists, and exactly one digital copy. If I want to ensure data integrity of the digital copy, how can I ensure there will never be hard drive failure without making additional copies? Assume I'm a complete cyber nub with zero education.